


Self-Destruction isn't always Obvious

by a_cruel_cruel_girl



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Depression, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Recovery, Sad, Sad Josh, Self-Destruction, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Tyler Joesph - Freeform, depressed, getting better, josh dun - Freeform, joshler - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 17:39:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10746597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_cruel_cruel_girl/pseuds/a_cruel_cruel_girl
Summary: Tyler is depressed but it takes him a long time to realise it. Self destruction isn't that simple and it's not always obvious but then Josh joins Twenty One Pilots, and it starts getting better.Trigger: Mentions suicide and self-harm.





	Self-Destruction isn't always Obvious

I used to think that everyone had those moments where they honest to god wanted to kill themselves. Apparently that doesn’t happen to everyone. 

I don’t understand how not everyone looks at the mirror one day and see’s all the cracks in your their muddy broken face and decides that maybe life just isn’t worth living and that maybe your just an asshole. 

I don’t mean like you go to make breakfast, but there isn’t any bread so you tweet. “Kms.”  
I mean like you look at yourself and you really think to yourself. “I wish I wasn’t ever born” or “Maybe if I took too many pills I won’t wake up tomorrow.” 

I told this to Jenna once and she said that never in her life had she wished she was dead. I mean sure she’d been sad and upset especially when her aunt died or when she read the ‘fault in our stars’. But she hadn’t ever felt depressed. She hadn’t ever felt suicidal.

Maybe saying or thinking it once doesn’t make you actually suicidal but you get what i’m saying. She’d never wanted to die.

That was such a foreign strange idea to me. 

I think the first time I really wanted to die was after a whole week of bad luck. Chris had just announced he wanted to quit, which I understood for sure. And that wasn’t it. I wanted him to leave and get on with his life. I’m a strong believer in that kinda thing. But it also meant that I was down to me being the only member as Nick had already left too. But even still I carried on strong. 

But then at home Maddie kept crying because her high school boyfriend had broken up with her. My mum shouted at me for tracking dirt into the house,and I felt like I was being smothered. Are hot water tank was broken too. 

So everyday I’d get in the shower and I’d sit at the bottom of the bath being soaked to the point where I’d go numb and I didn’t know why I would but I couldn’t ever stop myself.

So now your probably think, you feel suicidal because you're evidently depressed. Or at least you were. 

And yeah I guess that’s true but I never realised I was depressed because I never wanted to cut myself, I mean I always thought that kinda thing was dumb and that I’d never want to that. But I self harmed. I just did it undetected by myself and everyone. 

It started off with the simplist of things like I knew that coffee would keep me up all night but I’d make myself a cup at 1am for no reason. I didn’t even like coffee that much but suddenly I felt like I needed to have it every night. It meant I was tired all the time. I was always grouchy.

My mum realised at some point but thought I was just being dumb so she swapped out the caffeinated for decaf, thinking I just liked coffee. However I’d already polluted my mind. I may of got more sleep because the wasn’t a drug keeping me up but I guess it was a negative placebo because I still can’t sleep at night though I have eventually stopped drinking coffee at 1am. 

Although it’s still comforting for some terrible reason. 

It also came in bursts of doing my clothes to tightly. Either a belt or tie or an elastic band around my wrist, I would effectively strangle myself daily. Again without realisation when I put on my trousers everyday I would put my belt uncomfortably tight.

By the end of every day my hips would red raw and after months of doing this I would bruise and blister along my side. I just thought my pants were made of a bad material but that they were perfectly intact so the was no point buying new ones. 

And I would constantly wear an elastic band around my wrist which I would snap constantly. My skin becoming frail underneath it. Although my subconscious was really clever about it because I would only dod it at certain times. When no one was around and I would have time for the redness to wonder of my delicate skin. 

And you're all probably thinking how would you not notice that you were in pain constantly. I have three things to say to that.

The first is that well I was very stressed out with the band. I was scared and alone and thought that everything I’d put into Twenty One Pilots was going to be over and I’d have to go to college again. I just thought I was stressed out.

The second is that It gets a whole lot worse.

The third is that it then got a whole lot better. 

I started to not leave the house. All the invites from Nick, Chris and a few other friends,stopped coming in because I turned them all down. I would lie and write songs in the dark a lot. I debated to start smoking, or to even drink but again I thought that it was dumb and that I knew I shouldn’t do that kinda stuff. It was dumb.

Then it got worse.

When I’d start arranging musical pieces and doing the piano parts, if I did something wrong I would hit myself. 

Now you definitely think something is up. I hit myself and I didn’t think i was depressed? Didn’t my parents do anything?

I hit myself in places they didn’t see. I stopped eating as much which my parents really did worry about but they thought I was eating at least triple what I actually was. 

One day my mum knocked on my door and looked me in my sunken dark eyes and said “Tyler you're depressed” 

I had instantly said “No I’m not mum, I’ve never cut myself. And I know you think it but I’m not starving myself” I laughed trying to lighten the solid mood. 

“Tyler, I love you, the is nothing wrong with you being depressed, i just want to help you get better.”

I think it clicked then, when I realised I ‘d been wishing I was dead all day. 

“Yeah”

“Yeah” my mum had replied. She then pulled me into a hug and I cried a lot. 

After that I started to go to therapy and I realised I’d been depressed for probably most of my teenage years but that I just hadn’t ever realise it.

Depression Isn’t always doing stuff that society recognises as instant signs. Sometimes it is just not looking after yourself. But when I was growing up it wasn’t something i had to worry about too much. I wouldn’t remember to eat or drink water or do stuff to keep me out of trouble, like doing homework or taking my shoes off before entering the hall. But I was kid people let it slide, my mum reminded me how to take care of myself.

But now I’m an adult, I’m the one who responsible now. 

I always thought everyone thought about killing themselves, that they planned how to do it as they fell asleep. I told this to Josh once. He said he doesn’t anymore but he definitely did when he was depressed. So maybe a lot of us say it as a joke and maybe you say it a couple times if something bad happens but you don't actually mean it. But be careful because if you think you wanna kill yourself and your serious but you aren’t classically depressed, Maybe you need some help too. And that isn’t a bad thing. 

\--

I started getting better. Because I went to therapy I started getting out the house, I started eating more because I was “forced” to. Just from leaving the house and knowing my parents were there for me that I was a little happier. I wasn’t cured but I started to see friends a little more.

Chris told me to come to a party one day. I asked who would be there. Him, Nick and couple people and this guy called Josh who I’d met before, He came to our shows and he played the drums. 

 

After a couple more times of meeting Josh around the pace I decided to ask him to be the drummer of Twenty One Pilots. 

It really did start getting better then.

I would still do my belt to tight and flick my elastic band. Even though I now knew I was depressed and I had told my therapist that I felt like crap most the time I hadn’t gone into too much detail about it. 

One day Josh asked me about the elastic band that was always hugging my wrist. 

“Tyler, why do you always have that on your wrist?”  
Josh was definitely my saviour. Now he knew I was depressed and we were close but this probably when he realised how far I’d gone and how much he wanted to help. 

“I snap it, against my skin, it hurts”

“So why don’t you take it off”

“It’s a comfort blanket.”

“I think that’s a form of self harm.”

“I think you're right Josh”

“I think we should take it off, yeah?” 

I shook my head and Josh didn’t insist but that night when we were lying on the terrible mattress in the back of a van in a random parking lot. Josh told me that he would eventually get me to take it off.

\--

Eventually because of how much Josh’s friendship meant to me, I made a deal with him saying that I would stop snapping it but that I didn’t want to take it off because it was comforting. 

He agreed not wanting to overstep his boundary but was unsure because he didn’t know whether I would do it when I wasn’t with him. 

I kept my promise and I tried to stop snapping it, but every time I did, I texted him to apologize. A month and a half later I basically didn’t do it anymore or at least nowhere near as much. I stopped quite quickly and that's because I was with Josh almost constantly. 

One day Josh turned to me and said “What if I had a way in which you would have the comfort of it being there but the temptation never would be?

\--

The next day we were at a tattoo parlour and I got my first tattoo.

\---

While all this was occurring Josh also found out that I did my belt way to tight. When he first found out. Probably two weeks after the elastic band, he was very worried, and rightly so.

Whenever we changed, even though we were very close we turned away from each other. It’s common courtesy. But one day Josh turned around while I was only in my boxers. It was bound to happen.

His eyes watered and he tilted his head to the side.

He went to his bag and pulled out a pot on moisturizer. He walked towards me.

“Oh Tyler”

That was the happiest moment of my life because he leant over and kissed my lips chastely. He then fell to the ground in front of me and began to put moisturizer on my red angry hips. Before he put the last bit on he kissed my hip bone and massaged the moisturizer in.

“It’s gonna be okay”

That was the first night in years that I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night with the concept of red angry eyes torturing me. 

I still do silly things. I still find coffee pleasant at 1am knowing that it’ll keep me thinking all night. I still skip meals sometimes knowing the emptiness reminds me of being sad and that odd comfort that comes with it. I still sometimes hit myself but I know that Josh will find the bruises and it’ll make him sad. And It’ll make me sad too in the long run. 

But I’m not depressed anymore, or maybe I am but I have constant help and I’m not afraid to ask for it.


End file.
